How Amazon Grows NFL Audience On Thursday Nights

When Amazon Prime Video first secured exclusivity over Thursday Night Football games starting with the 2022 season, there was optimism about how it fueled the NFL’s gradual move toward streaming. But that was also accompanied by concerns:

How would Amazon get fans tuning in on the service en masse?

Now, several years later, the better question may be around whether TNF’s audience growth stops any time soon.

Thursday Night Tune-In Keeps Climbing

Last week’s Buffalo Bills vs. Houston Texans game averaged 14.19 million viewers, marking the sixth time TNF topped 14 million viewers this season. That matches the combined total from 2022-24, and is indicative of the steady rise of Amazon’s NFL package over these past few years.

This year’s Thursday night games on Prime Video are averaging 14.78 million viewers per game, which is up 12% compared to the 2024 full-season average, 23% versus 2023 and 54% when stacked up against 2022.

And while NFL ratings are up overall in 2025, Amazon is the partner that requires a subscription and internet connection to watch. Yet, it’s not trailing the average game on CBS afternoon games by an enormous amount. The broadcast network was drawing 18.61 million per contest through October; its highest total over the season’s first eight weeks since 1998.

The soaring successes for TNF also come at an opportune time for Amazon given the approaching holiday season. Data shared by iSpot shows that Amazon is the most-seen holiday advertiser since October 1 this year, with 6.71% of holiday shopping household TV ad impressions (before counting Amazon Prime, which accounts for another 1.39%).

For the third straight year, Amazon aims to make a big splash for Black Friday, too. Along with a high-profile battle between the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles (both 8-3) that afternoon, Prime Video will also feature an NBA doubleheader in the evening. First, the Milwaukee Bucks will visit the New York Knicks, followed by the Los Angeles Lakers hosting the Dallas Mavericks in the night cap.

The Vision Fueling Prime Vision

While big properties like the NFL and NBA help draw eyeballs into Amazon Prime Video’s sports ecosystem, the service’s growth can also be attributed to the unique culture of innovation around what it puts on TV – both within the main game broadcast and the Prime Vision With Next Gen Stats feed.

After the official debut of the “Pocket Health” feature on Nov. 13, there was palpable excitement in Prime Vision’s production room inside Amazon’s Culver City (Los Angeles) studios, as the team not only saw the visual hit the air, but also heard it discussed on the main feed.

“The closer they get to knowing how (Patriots quarterback) Drake Maye manipulates a pocket, the more they’re going to want to watch on our show, and the more excitement they’re going to have watching Prime Vision,” said Sam Schwartzstein, Analytics Expert, Prime Video Sports. “And that’s why we have the best job, because that’s our task – to make a show that we want to watch, right?”

Schwartzstein’s perspective, in particular, is a key part of what makes the Prime Vision feed – and the modest team that powers it in real-time during games – work so well.

The former center at Stanford is on-camera for points of the game, and his passion for educating fans with engaging data is obvious. Schwartzstein was a driving force in developing Pocket Health, and he described how he annotated thousands of plays as the feature was being built out over the course of years.

Amazon’s (already top-notch) technological capabilities also caught up to his aspirations for Pocket Health. Schwartzstein and Prime Video Sports Senior Coordinating Producer Alex Strand emphasized how even with the considerable computing power at their disposal, the current iteration of Pocket Health wouldn’t have even been possible two years ago.

But organizational support for experimentation and testing the boundaries of what’s feasible helped keep it bouncing around. And eventually, was key to getting it to air in the form audiences saw during the Patriots’ win over the Jets.

Making Smarter Sports Fans

Those experiments are largely constructed while building toward a long roadmap and multiple potential uses for the Prime Video Sports team (or even beyond, within other parts of Amazon). While doing so, those ideas have made for a smart and entertaining game experience that carves out Amazon’s unique and frankly, cool, approach to engaging with football.

“I think we give fans a lot of credit, and we’ll continue to look back at plays that happened and break down what had happened,” said Strand, while discussing the balance between showcasing what’s happened and more predictive features.

“But instead of talking at them about what they’ve already seen, we want to kind of bring them in and help them kind of see what’s coming up next.”

Added Strand: “… And that’s the thing we’re having a lot of fun with, is figuring out how to, like, open people’s eyes and help them watch the sport (football) they watch their whole lives, in a little bit of a different way.”

Those ideas are conceivably working for younger audiences as well, despite most accounts finding that they have not been watching as much football – or any sports – as older generations. To-date this season, Amazon’s median age (47.8) is nearly eight years younger than linear NFL audiences, and TNF has the largest 18-to-34 audience of any league rights holder.

A 2024 PwC survey around those same 18-to-34 year-old sports fans found that just 19% of those fans watch an entire game when tuning in from home, while 47% surf the internet while watching.

For many of them, televised sports have been easy to tune out because they’re omnipresent in the U.S. and look similar across traditional networks.

By showcasing social-worthy features and novel game views (Prime Vision utilizes a higher angle “video game” format), Prime Video Sports is at least putting the effort in to meet those viewers where they are – one Thursday night at a time during football season.